Deploying your Rails 3 app to heroku (on their Cedar stack)?

Protip

Don’t forget to run this command—ya know, just as you would when first running the app locally on your own machine.
(Might save you 20 minutes of chin-scratching!)

heroku run rake db:migrate

Good times!

Remember that one time when I moved to Chicago to start Code Academy The Starter League? Oh wait, that just happened!

Back Story

After graduating from college, I wisely decided to pursue my interests in technology and got a job working at Mahalo in Santa Monica, CA. (Many fun stories on this experience, of course. I’ll save them for future posts—including, “Greg’s guide to getting a job at a startup”. Good times.) After Mahalo was slapped by Google (note to self: avoid building a business entirely reliant on another company for both traffic and revenue) I parted ways and joined the team at Border Stylo.

I absolutely fell in love with startups. I soon realized that I wanted to become more technical myself so that I could start actualizing my own ideas and start a company of my own. Enter Code Academy.

Why Code Academy The Starter League?

Of course, there are many nice, free, online and interactive “teach yourself how to program” resources these days that enable an aspiring developer to teach herself various languages at her own pace, on her own time (not to mention all of the free and paid video courses that have been available for years).

But, I was looking for something that met the following criteria:

1. I wanted to do this full-time and completely immerse myself without any distractions;
2. I wanted an environment where I could work alongside others that were equally as dedicated and passionate about becoming developers;
3. And, I wanted an adventure—I wanted to travel and live somewhere new for a while.
   Code Academy offered my all of these things and more so I jumped on the opportunity, applied for a spot, was accepted (duh), and made it happen. In talking with some of the then-current (now former) students before and while I applying, I was left without any doubt: this was the program for me and would be awesome.

The Focus

The focus over the next 12 weeks (the duration of Code Academy) will be Ruby on Rails, and a healthy dose of HTML, CSS, and Javascript to be dangerous. In talking with folks, it’s clear that many are looking to land a gig at a startup or dev shop once things are done, others are focusing on an existing idea for a web app that they came into the program with already and will pour everything they learn into that one idea, while many others are somewhere in between.

Code Academy offered a design class this quarter and so we’ll also be working closely with them throughout on the various projects we create throughout, hackathons, demo-day projects, etc.

The Beginning

Things have only just begun and so there’s not too much to share yet. But count on the fact that I’ll be posting regular updates on my progress, funny anecdotes, and everything in between in the coming weeks and months while I’m in Chicago.